Thank you for sharing this. It is very encouraging as someone who wants to use bitcoin for long-term savings for future expenses.

美味しそう！🤤

Thanks for the response. I think the self-sovereign identity solution you described might be a bit too much complexity for me as an individual. I’m also thinking it would be too much for the people in my life who might get scared off by the additional tax accounting when getting into bitcoin. I do plan to find an accountant with bitcoin experience down the road. Right now I’m using a spreadsheet, keeping CVS transaction data when available, and screenshots otherwise. Since I haven’t gone through my first tax season post bitcoin purchase, I’m still feeling uncertain about my setup and it’s been causing me to be wary of sending boosts to podcasts.

Excellent article! I particularly appreciated you simply explaining the backup procedure with tap signers since it does differ from the bip39 norm.

Does this mean that coin joining will be illegal soon even if used to protect privacy?

#[0]​ , do you have any thoughts on how to approach tracking cost basis and record keeping in a way that preserves privacy while remaining compliant with tax law? Using something like crypto.com would be easier than spreadsheets for tracking cost basis but is a potential privacy risk . On the IRS side of things, using specific identifier for cost basis instead of FIFO can reduce tax liability, but to use it you must either specify transaction Id, public key, private key, or have sufficient record keeping. Clearly, all but record keeping is a no go from a privacy and security perspective. However, it’s unclear what is “sufficient” record keeping and how to do it in a manner that is as private as possible while holding up to audit level scrutiny.

Congrats! I’m at 8,337 steps so I need to get back outside to reach my 10K step goal.

#[3]​ is this the note you were talking about? https://bountsr.org/nostr-based-github/

Your description of nostr as a decentralized communication protocol in your last Rabbithole Recap made Nostr finally click for me and is why I’m trying it out now. I would love if nostr ends up being a tool that makes the software development ecosystem more decentralized and censorship resistant.

That’s a sexy beast! I’m saving up my coins to get one.

I have not personally used Samourai Whirlpool but it has a good reputation. It uses a centralized coordinator model to arrange splitting and mixing your coins. This makes it a bit easier to use from a user’s perspective. This model requires you to trust the coordinator. If you want a coin joining tool that does not have a central coordinator, you could look into join market and the jam web app front end. It is known to be a bit more difficult from a usability perspective but used a decentralized coin joining model.

Here is a stab at an explanation. With whirlpool, your coin is broken into multiple smaller coins. Each smaller coin is then swapped with a random coin from a bag of other same sized coins. You control up to how many times you want to do a swap with your smaller coins. The privacy comes from the fact that you are randomly swapping coin histories when you swap coins. The more swaps that are performed the lower the chance that any one coin history is your history. The cost is an initial transaction fee to enter he whirlpool but you don’t have to pay for additional mixes while you remain in the whirlpool.

I appreciate both perspectives here. I want to save for retirement tax free using bitcoin and a bitcoin Roth IRA seems to enable this while maintaining custody. At the same time, I’m concerned that a hostile regulatory environment may lead to making my necessarily KYCed retirement funds illegal. Any thoughts about this possibility?